Author: staff
Published on 21/04/2026 – 17:03 GMT+2 Qatar has urged an end to the Iran war and a return to negotiations on Tuesday, saying it is in contact with all parties as uncertainty surrounds US-Iran talks in Islamabad. “The crisis is ours, and the crisis of our region. That’s why we have direct contacts,” foreign ministry spokesperson Dr Majed al-Ansari said at a press conference in Doha. Al-Ansari added that Qatar supports maintaining the ceasefire as uncertainty remains over whether talks are moving forward. “Our call has only been to end this war and return to the negotiation table,” he said.…
Published on 21/04/2026 – 17:14 GMT+2 Kazakhstan, one of the biggest and greenest countries in the world, has announced plans to expand its national parks. This move is expected to add around 20,000 square kilometres of protected land by 2035, bringing the total to approximately 332,000 square kilometres – bigger than in either Poland or Italy. Believed to be where the apple originated, Kazakhstan is also famed for its massive steppe landscapes, vibrant red Charyn Canyon, dramatic Altai Mountains and the Kaindy Lake, with its submerged forest. The Central Asian country is also known for its nomadic culture, especially eagle…
This is particularly wounding for Starmer because Doyle, like Mandelson, has since been embroiled in a scandal over his past association with a pedophile. (Mandelson resigned over the depth of his friendship with the late convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in September, while Doyle campaigned in 2017 for a friend who had been charged with child sex offenses, and was later convicted.) It was in March 2025, when Robbins was making large numbers of career civil servants redundant in a restructure. He told MPs he was “under strict instruction” from No. 10’s private office not to discuss the offer with then-Foreign…
Emmanuel Macron will host Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam on Tuesday evening, as new talks between Israel and Lebanon are expected to take place in Washington on Thursday. The visit comes as the Élysée Palace said France intends to”reaffirm its commitment to the strict respect of the ceasefire, France’s support for Lebanon’s territorial integrity and the steps taken by the Lebanese state to fully guarantee its sovereignty and arms monopoly.” This diplomatic sequence is unfolding in a particularly tense atmosphere following the death on Saturday of a French soldier serving with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). All…
Three men aged 24, 25, and 26 were arrested in Harpenden, a town in Hertfordshire, on Sunday evening and taken into custody before being released on bail. A 25-year-old man was arrested in Stevenage on Monday, while a 26-year-old man and two women, aged 50 and 59, were arrested in a car near Birmingham. They remain in custody in a London police station. Separately, a 39-year-old man was arrested Tuesday morning in Ealing, west London, under section 41 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and taken into custody. His arrest was in connection with an existing investigation after jars containing a non-hazardous…
Published on 21/04/2026 – 15:33 GMT+2 Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni issued a sharp rebuke of a Swiss hospital on Tuesday for allegedly billing the families of some of the victims in a devastating fire at a bar in the Alpine skiing resort of Crans-Montana on New Year’s Eve. “I spoke with our ambassador: the Swiss authorities have assured us that it was a mistake, and that the families will not have to pay anything,” Meloni wrote in a post on X. “But I asked the ambassador to maintain the highest level of attention to this issue, because it would…
“We will assess whether we need a minimum stock obligation for jet fuel, requiring member states to maintain minimum emergency reserves,” he said during the press conference. Tzitzikostas also said the AccelerateEU plan — which the Commission will present Wednesday in response to recent energy market shocks — will include the creation of a new fuel observatory, which “will start with jet fuel,” and efforts to secure “an alternative jet fuel supply for Europe, such as type A jet fuel produced in the United States.” However, the fuel produced in the U.S. differs from the Jet A1 international standard, making it…
Published on 21/04/2026 – 14:20 GMT+2 Russia and North Korea held a ceremony on Tuesday to mark the joining of the first road bridge connecting the two countries which is set to open for traffic this summer, Moscow said. Ties between the two heavily sanctioned countries have surged amid Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with Moscow and Pyongyang deepening economic, political, cultural and military links. South Korea warned last week that Chinese and Russian support was helping revive the North Korean economy, which has struggled for years under sweeping international sanctions, almost complete international isolation and huge military investment. Moscow’s…
Published on 21/04/2026 – 14:26 GMT+2 German economic expectations have fallen to their lowest level in three and a half years, as the Iran war weighs on businesses across Europe. The ZEW index dropped 16.7 points in April to -17.2, according to a new survey by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), based on responses from 192 analysts polled last week about their outlook for the next six months. It is the second consecutive monthly decline, following a sharp fall in March. “Economic expectations are slipping into negative territory,” said ZEW president Achim Wambach. “The economic consequences of the…
By Theo Farrant & AP Published on 21/04/2026 – 13:24 GMT+2 The human brain retains such a deep-rooted memory of gravity that astronauts in space continue to misjudge how tightly to grip objects even after spending months in weightlessness, according to a new study. Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the findings shed new light on how profoundly our lifelong experience of gravity shapes the most basic physical actions, and could have real implications for future missions to the Moon and Mars. The study, led by Philippe Lefèvre, a professor of Biomedical Engineering at Université Catholique de Louvain and Ikerbasque, tracked 11 astronauts…